The Politics Of Children S Services Reform

Drawing on unique access to prominent policy makers including ministers, senior civil servants, local authority directors, and the leaders of children’s sector NGOs, Purcell re-examines two decades of children’s services reform under both Labour and Conservative-led governments. By closely examining the origins of Labour’s Every Child Matters programme, the Munro Review, and more recent Conservative reforms affecting child and family social workers, the impact of high profile child abuse cases, including Victoria Climbié and Baby P, are reassessed and the party-political drivers of successive waves of reform are revealed.

Drawing on unique access to prominent policy makers including ministers, senior civil servants, local authority directors, and the leaders of children’s sector NGOs, Purcell re-examines two decades of children’s services reform under both Labour and Conservative-led governments. He closely examines the origins of Labour’s Every Child Matters programme, the Munro review and more recent Conservative reforms affecting child and family social workers to reassess the impact of high profile child abuse cases, including Victoria Climbié and Baby P, and reveal the party political drivers of successive reform.

Exploring the current and historical tensions between liberal capitalism and indigenous models of family life, Ian Kelvin Hyslop argues for a new model of child protection in Aotearoa New Zealand and other parts of the Anglophone world. He puts forward the case that child safety can only be sustainably advanced by policy initiatives which promote social and economic equality and from practice which takes meaningful account of the complex relationship between economic circumstances and the lived realities of service users.

People, Politics, and Child Welfare in British Columbia traces the evolution of policies and programs intended to protect children in BC from neglect and abuse. Analyzing this evolution reveals that child protection policy and practice has reflected the priorities of politicians and public servants in power. With few exceptions, efforts to establish effective programs have focused on structural arrangements, staffing responsibilities, and rules to regulate the practice of child welfare workers. Contributors to this book conclude that these attempts have been unsuccessful thus far because they have failed to address the impact of poverty on clients. The need to respect the cultural traditions and values of First Nations clients has also been ignored. Effective services require recognizing and remedying poverty's impact, establishing community control over services, and developing a radically different approach to the day-to-day practice of child welfare workers. People, Politics, and Child Welfare in British Columbia provides a crucial assessment of the state of child welfare in the province. Practitioners, scholars, and students in social work, child and youth care, education, and other human-service professions will find this book particularly important.

The transformation of child care after welfare reform in New York City and the struggle against that transformation is a largely untold story. In the decade following welfare reform, despite increases in child care funding, there was little growth in New York’s unionized, center-based child care system and no attempt to make this system more responsive to the needs of working mothers. As the city delivered child care services “on the cheap,” relying on non-union home child care providers, welfare rights organizations, community legal clinics, child care advocates, low-income community groups, activist mothers, and labor unions organized to demand fair solutions to the child care crisis that addressed poor single mothers’ need for quality, affordable child care as well as child care providers’ need for decent work and pay. Social Reproduction and the City tells this story, linking welfare reform to feminist research and activism around the “crisis of care,” social reproduction, and the neoliberal city. At a theoretical level, Simon Black’s history of this era presents a feminist political economy of the urban welfare regime, applying a social reproduction lens to processes of urban neoliberalization and an urban lens to feminist analyses of welfare state restructuring and resistance. Feminist political economy and feminist welfare state scholarship have not focused on the urban as a scale of analysis, and critical approaches to urban neoliberalism often fail to address questions of social reproduction. To address these unexplored areas, Black unpacks the urban as a contested site of welfare state restructuring and examines the escalating crisis in social reproduction. He lays bare the aftermath of the welfare-to-work agenda of the Giuliani administration in New York City on child care and the resistance to policies that deepened race, class, and gender inequities.

Every Child Matters represents the most radical change to education and welfare provision in almost two decades. This book moves beyond a descriptive ‘how to’ framework to examine the underlying political and social aims of this policy agenda. The authors’ analysis reveals that Every Child Matters represents the Government’s attempt to codify perceived risks in society and to formulate their responses. In doing so, children are made the strategic focus of much wider social policy reform, the effects of which are first felt in education. Does Every Child Matter? explores the ramifications of this along three key lines of analysis: the restructuring of the state beyond its welfare functions changes in governance and the creation of new binaries a redefining of the education sector around the needs of the child. This book provides a unique and insightful critique of Every Child Matters and its contribution to understandings of New Labour social policy. It locates the genesis of the policy in terms of its social, political and historical contexts and questions the validity of constructing social policy around issues of child welfare. Students, academics and researchers in education studies and education policy will find this book of great interest.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama in March 2010 is a landmark in U.S. social legislation, and the Supreme Court's recent decision upholding the Act has ensured that it will remain the law of the land. The new law extends health insurance to nearly all Americans, fulfilling a century-long quest and bringing the United States to parity with other industrial nations. Affordable Care aims to control rapidly rising health care costs and promises to make the United States more equal, reversing four decades of rising disparities between the very rich and everyone else. Millions of people of modest means will gain new benefits and protections from insurance company abuses - and the tab will be paid by privileged corporations and the very rich. How did such a bold reform effort pass in a polity wracked by partisan divisions and intense lobbying by special interests? What does Affordable Care mean-and what comes next? In this updated edition of Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol-two of the nation's leading experts on politics and health care policy-provide a concise and accessible overview. They explain the political battles of 2009 and 2010, highlighting White House strategies, the deals Democrats cut with interest groups, and the impact of agitation by Tea Partiers and progressives. Jacobs and Skocpol spell out what the new law can do for everyday Americans, what it will cost, and who will pay. In a new section, they also analyze the impact the Supreme Court ruling that upheld the law. Above all, they explain what comes next, as critical yet often behind-the-scenes battles rage over implementing reform nationally and in the fifty states. Affordable Care still faces challenges at the state level despite the Court ruling. But, like Social Security and Medicare, it could also gain strength and popularity as the majority of Americans learn what it can do for them. What Everyone Needs to Know® is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.

Offers an analysis of the politics of court reform through a focused review of Indonesia's complex court system.